Telstra hit by nationwide outage

TELSTRA customers are being forced to pay cash following a nationwide outage affecting its EFTPOS and ATM services.

The telco giant has confirmed the problem is affecting its machine-to-machine (M2M) data services, impacting devices that employ cellular connections.

"We are currently experiencing an issue with some enterprise customer machine to machine (M2M) data services, which is impacting services including EFTPOS Devices and ATMs," the telco said in an online statement. "We apologise for the inconvenience and hope to resolve the issue as soon as possible."

Furious customers have taken to social media to vent over the issue:

It comes just two days after the telco suffered a separate outage affecting its cloud services.

The outage affected a number of Telstra's online features including access to Telstra.com, MyAccount, Online Billing, the Telstra 24/7 app, Telstra Consumer Webmail and some Telstra Wholesale apps.

It lasted from around 4.45am up until just before 6pm Wednesday evening.

The telco has been hit with multiple outages in the past year, which prompted its shares to drop to a seven-year low in May.

At the time, it said network issues on mobile services were caused by a software default.